


Solus, Soulless, Solace

by Blake



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Consensual fighting, Depression, Established Relationship, M/M, Robo-Sam, Self-harming tendencies, Soulless Sam, Soulless sex, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 16:26:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Devotion is a far cry from love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solus, Soulless, Solace

**Author's Note:**

> I've always found Sam's soullessness immensely compelling as a metaphor. I wanted to try my hand at it. It's probably the most brutal thing I've written. I hope that you enjoy it. I'd love to hear from you if you did.

_Solus_

You are sitting on one bed, Dean on the other. _Back to the Future_ is on the TV. You are laughing. You’re great at laughing. It’s one of the things you’ve got down.

You can tell it’s working especially well because Dean keeps glancing over at you with this summery greenness to his eyes.

Funny how you’re better at cataloguing all the shades of green (eighty-seven of them) Dean’s eyes can be than you ever were before. You’ve never been able to see so clearly.

This July-cornfield green means that you’re laughing just right. Laughing the way he wants to see his little brother laugh: alive again, above ground again, able again to enjoy the important things in life, like Doc Brown’s wordless screams of panic.

You’re not sure why, but you think he should go on believing you’re the little brother he wants you to be. You think you should keep on laughing perfectly. You think it makes him happy. You think, you’re pretty sure, he wants to be happy. That’s what most people want, you’ve noticed.

His eyes keep flickering over to you and you can practically see his heart swelling each time. It’s been days since he found out you’re topside, days since he dropped his life to hunt by your side again, and he still can’t believe you’re here. He’s still afraid to believe you’re here, because it’s what he wants most and Dean Winchester never gets what he wants most.

You’re (somewhat) living proof of that.

Time wears on. You start to get a little distracted, because you know that before the movie ends, Dean is going to want more. You have to be prepared. He’s going to want more proof that his little brother is back, and you will have to give it to him.

You don’t know why your perfectly tuned laughter isn’t enough, but you know that it isn’t. Dean’s little brother wouldn’t sit still for two hours without a greater range of emotion than _laughter_. You know that, but it’s very difficult to guess what other emotions would naturally spring up in such a circumstance. Laughter, you can handle. You can even feel it, a little bit. Someone says something clever or stupid, and muscle memory pulls your lips into an open smile, and it’s easy to force the air through. You like laughing. It’s nice to feel something happen almost naturally.

But even though you have all eighty-seven shades of Dean’s eyes memorized, and you remember with clarity everything that happened to you before the cage, you still can’t imagine what emotions would occur naturally in this situation. You don’t know what you should be feeling, sitting with your brother in the first motel room you’ve been alone together in since he discovered your existence, watching a funny movie. You think it makes sense to just laugh, but that’s not quite right.

Dean’s eyes have darkened to the color of ferns in sunlight, and his glances to you have lengthened from three seconds to seven. On the screen, Marty is being kissed on the mouth by his mother and you start to laugh before you remember that this is the part you and Dean usually awkwardly ignore. It seems pointless to you to bother turning your gaze from something that makes you uncomfortable, but you do it now, because it’s what Dean expects you to do. You turn your head and clear your throat. You try to think of what topic-changer Dean expects you to come up with.

But Dean speaks first.

“Hey man,” he says. His voice is quiet. He sounds like he’s coaxing a particularly reserved cat out from under the couch. His eyes are the color of ferns, in the shade. “You doin’ okay?”

You think you may be startled. You think you may be amused. You realize you haven’t been convincing Dean as well as you thought, because if _Dean_ is volunteering to _talk_ about _feelings_ , then you must be letting too many things go unsaid. You make a mental note to check in on Dean more often, because if you ask him to talk about his feelings frequently enough, he will be blissfully blinded by irritation at being asked to talk about things. You think you are a fool to have forgotten this key aspect of your role. “I’m fine,” you say, trying to smile only a moderate amount.

Dean’s face sinks subtly into disappointment. He shifts his weight from one elbow, resting on his knee, to the other elbow, and then centered between them again. You watch his bare feet contracting thoughtlessly in the carpet, and you think what a weird mechanism the human foot is. “Really?” Dean asks, for the sole purpose of voicing his skepticism, it seems. “You, you’re fine?” His voice pulls downward at the end, heavy with disbelief.

You meet his eyes, which are speckled with watery blue now so they’re the shade of Lake Shasta. You think you should have something to say other than _yes_. You rub your thumbs up and down the inside seams of your jeans at the knee and you search inside yourself for something to offer. You know Dean wants something more. You know you should be able to give him more. You should be able to give him something to fix, to do for you, to help you with.

But no matter how hard you think, you can’t come up with anything.

“Yeah,” you say, and it might be a laugh. You smile, and gesture to the television. “Movie’s funny, this is a fun time, the beer’s… shit, but that’s good,” you list, as if it’s the simple things in life that make it worthwhile. As if you know it’s worthwhile. “I’m fine,” you say, absolutely honest. You laugh again, because it’s such a novelty to be absolutely honest. “Feeling totally fine,” you repeat. The more you say it, the more it _feels_ like something; for once, there’s not the wide chasm of difference between what you say you’re feeling and what you’re feeling, making it quite clear by comparison that you’re not feeling very much at all.

The corner of Dean’s mouth lifts, his cheek catching on it. You turn back to the movie because Marty shredding guitar was your favorite part when you were really young, and because it will make your enjoyment seem authentic. You think you should have realized this earlier: the only thing Dean wants more than his little brother back is his little brother back and able to sit through a whole movie feeling nothing but thorough enjoyment. If Dean keeps on believing that you’re having a great time, he’ll stay happy. He won’t need more.

His eyes never stop darting over to you, though. Then, not even waiting for the end credits to start up, he stops pretending to be paying attention to the movie. You watch him make a dramatic show of shaking the beer bottle in his hand only to feel its weightlessness, hear its emptiness. Then he’s walking in front of you, blocking the TV, and sitting down right next to you. The way he sits is kind of open, one knee bent on the bed so his shin is pressed against your thigh, the other foot on the floor so he’s half-facing you.

It’s all so he can take your beer out of your hand and take a long pull from it.

It’s all so he can brush his shoulder against yours.

_Desolare_ , you think abruptly. A lot of the Latin you studied in college has been coming back to you recently. It’s very soothing, evenly patterned. The word _desolate_ comes from the Latin _de_ , meaning _completely_ , and _solare_ , which in turn comes from _solus_ , which means _alone_. It’s comforting to you to know that despite common usage, _desolation_ is not a feeling. It is the condition of being made completely alone. It is the condition of having nothing living inside yourself. It is the condition of nothing being able to touch you.

He touches your skin, and it’s another chasm between what you should feel and what you do not. You tense up, completely alone in the wake of his touch.

But you recover easily. It’s not as if it made you feel something. You’re not upset. Just, desolate.

You know what he wants. You know what he’s asking for. You know what he expects.

You consider giving it to him. There are few things more important to you than giving him what he expects, keeping him happy.

But you have other plans you’ve been counting on. It’s twenty degrees outside. You look out the window into the cold dark. You’ve been planning on going for a run, because the freeze will make sharp pains in your lungs. And it’s icy; there’s a chance you will slip and fall on your knee. You picture it. The white air bursting from your mouth, the strain in your sternum, the pull in your calf if you run long and fast enough, the tingling of frost on your palms from where you catch your fall. Your heart speeds up a bit. Your cock thickens slightly in your pants. Running will bring _sensation_. It’s guaranteed.

There’s no guarantee that fucking Dean will make you feel anything.

Actually, sex usually makes you feel something, but not as much as pain does. Pain’s a safer bet. It’s always best to spend some time sticking to safer bets, when you’re broke.

You draw your knees together so Dean’s shin is no longer touching your thigh. It must get some of the point across, because Dean’s all apologies, all guilt, as he often is when he feels like he forced his kid brother into doing something dirty against his will. He tries to hand back your beer even as he pulls back into himself, his hand reaching out but most of him retreating behind moss-colored eyes.

“Take it,” you say, waving to indicate he should finish the beer, and standing up. You turn and smile, and pretend that you have no idea he was asking for, that you have no idea you’re turning an offer down. “I’m gonna go for a run. You got another movie for when I get back?” you ask, even though you will probably be gone for hours, because once you start moving, it’s difficult to remember reasons to stop. Dean will be asleep when you return, but for now, he shouldn’t have to feel completely rejected. You think this will make him happy.

Dean swallows so that he can smile. “You bet,” he says. He takes another swig, hiding behind the upturned bottle and closed eyelids. You think this is better: him thinking he did something wrong. Despair must be better than desolation. He’s happier feeling guilty than he would be knowing what you really are.

 

_Soulless_

There are many more openings, but Dean is never pushy. He nudges, and you go for a run. You calculate that you can get away with this six times before he confronts you about it. His guilt will carry him through six subtle rejections.

The seventh time, you are in the car, parked in the motel lot. You’ve been driving so that Dean could elevate his leg up on the dashboard, his knee twisted real bad in a fight with a smalltime demigod you ended twenty-eight minutes ago. You’ve been driving, and Dean’s fingers have been at your ear, in your hair, at the nape of your neck, gently _stroking_. For fuck’s sake, you got one visible scrape by your temple, and he won’t stop _petting_ you. There are all these light, cautious touches, and you can take it-- you can take any amount of discomfort. But they’re irritating, and getting irritated at Dean would mean you would have to explain why you’re irritated.

You’re not planning to fuck him. You don’t have a plan. What happens is you make fists in his shirts and shove him backward until his spine slams against the passenger door, and his eyes are the color of the aurora borealis in the dim light falling through the top of the window, which means he is broken open.

You have to keep him broken open so he doesn’t put himself back together all wrong and misshapen and not believing you anymore. You kiss him with so much teeth behind it, he has to bite back before he can kiss you.

His palms are all over you and under your shirt and his breath is falling messy all over your face and neck. He’s so soft. You slam him backward again so the back of his head hits glass, and he reacts to the pain, diving forward so the bones of his face collide with the bones of yours, gripping with his nails.

You’re going to get laid tonight, you realize. For a second, you forget why you’ve been putting this off.

You lick deep into his mouth. You grab his hip in one hand and pull, putting him slouched and open on the seat, under you. You grope his dick through his jeans, reach further between his legs and squeeze as much of his ass as you can. You rub your palm all the way back up, hungry along the denim seam until you get to his fly. He’s harder under the heel of your hand than he was ten seconds ago.

His hands are in your hair and together, they pull. Then they pull harder. You free your lips from his and arch your neck into the pull. You work on catching your breath.

Dean’s the perfect kind of smart, catches on immediately. He grinds into your personal space until you’re the one under him. It’s only a couple of inches under him, a tiny angle, but it’s enough. You wrap your hand around the back of his neck and pull him down so you have leverage to kiss him hard. Then, his eyes catch fire like backlit jade.

You remember why you’ve been putting this off. It’s because your brother is in love, and you are not.

There used to be something inside you that wouldn’t like that. You don’t have a name for that missing piece, but you’re certain it would scream hoarsely and murder anyone who tried to fuck Dean under pretense of being the version of you that’s in love. You’re keenly aware that if this missing piece was present, it would stop you from fucking Dean.

You’re also keenly aware that this missing piece is _missing_.

You squeeze his ass and feel up all the places his body fills out his jeans. His thighs radiate heat. He sucks your tongue further into his mouth and it strikes you urgently.

“Fuck, Dean,” you pull back to say. His tongue darts out over his lips when yours does not. You chase his tongue with your fingertips, pushing the flesh of his lips around and watching the wet skin gather. “Can’t wait to have your mouth on my cock again, Dean, your fucking mouth.”

He jerks without grace or aim, so out of control already. You’re almost instantly hard, because you remember what it felt like to have his mouth on your cock, and you remember that it was a huge feeling. Sex, especially with Dean, used to be something you had very strong opinions and feelings about. Now, you know you won’t feel whatever it was you used to feel, with his mouth on your cock. But if it’s as big a feeling as you remember it being, you might at least achieve some amount of sensation. You press a rough hand to his dick while he sucks in a sharp breath, and then you press down on your own. You’re harder than he is, now. You really want to get out of your pants.

You start to unzip, but he grabs your wrist and stops you. His eyes flickers to various points through the windshield and windows, but it’s dark enough that you can’t use the color of his eyes to read his subtle communication. You’re also really hard, which makes it difficult to understand what could be more important than being hard. Finally, you realize that he doesn’t want to do this in the car, in the parking lot, cramped and out in the open at the same time.

You lead the way into the motel room.

He’s good at sucking you off, but it isn’t the fireworks you thought it might be. You have him on the floor in front of you, so you can watch the winces of pain on his face every time he rocks onto his injured knee. You wonder what it feels like. You wonder if it’s good.

You pull him off you and tackle him into the nearest bed. You loosely jerk his cock a few times and watch his eyelids flutter. Ideally, you would totally have him fuck you as hard as he was capable of fucking you. But he’s got that bum knee, and you consider how fast and hard he’s physically, mechanically capable of fucking you with a knee that’s swollen like that, and you don’t think he’d have enough leverage to do much for you.

Besides, you’re doing this because it’s what Dean expects, and surely part of what Dean expects is having his ass stretched full of your cock.

You roll him onto his back and bend his legs so you can lay yourself over the backs of his thighs and so he will go on believing he has his little brother back. You spread saliva all over two of your fingers so you can get inside him and you mouth kisses along his collarbone.

He looks up at you like you’re all he’s ever wanted, or salvation.

You never experience longing anymore, but there’s still a vacancy where it used to be, and that vacancy rings with echoes sometimes. Dean wants to be saved, and it doesn’t make you long to save him. It does, however, make you wish distantly that the longing could be there, if only to make this more real for Dean.

You start slow and easy as he swallows down pain you wish was yours, but the bobbing of his arched throat just makes your flesh crawl with impatience and envy. You can endure any amount of discomfort, though, even if you’re anxious to make him come apart in ways that you can’t. You start fucking him seriously only once he looks like he knows he wants it.

After twelve minutes, you’re really close. It’s a sheer cliff for you-- a plateau, and then a sheer cliff that surprises you so much it’s almost impossible not to follow it all the way down. Over the months, you’ve figured out ways of keeping yourself _close_ without letting yourself actually _get there_ , but you usually have the help of another person. Dean, closing his eyes and holding onto the headboard above him for leverage to meet each of your thrusts, is not prime material for helping you hold on.

So you say, “Dean, need you, bite me, hard as you can.” He only looks at you for two seconds, with jade eyes, before letting a moan slip out and complying. His abdominals contract even further as he crunches forward to bite your chest like he’s hungry for it. His teeth sink in so deep. Even if sensation won’t last long, at least it can be sharp.

You empty yourself inside him. You let the pinpricks of sensation overtake you. You put all your focus into experiencing them filling you. You sigh as they fade.

You suck Dean’s cock until he’s finished. He says, “Sam, Sam, Sammy, fuck, Sam,” and while his muscles slacken into post-orgasmic softness, he is smiling. It’s the most content you’ve seen him since you’ve been back.

Soon after that, he falls asleep. You watch him, because you don’t sleep. You’ve tried it before, and you’re actually really good at it. You’re as good at going on sleeping indefinitely as you are at staying awake indefinitely. It seems that you excel at whatever it is you happen to be doing. But sleeping isn’t rewarding in the same way that being awake and doing things is. When there’s no reward for shifting gears, you might as well stay in the one you’re in. So you watch Dean sleep.

His face is as relaxed as it ever gets, no knit on his brow, no dream-frowns. You gave him what he wanted; he still believes you.

As you watch him breathing evenly, you think about whether you want him to go on believing you. You don’t experience comfort or fear, but you experience their echoes when you consider this question. When you consider the possibility that he knows you too well, that your acting is not enough to fool him, there’s an echo of comfort. When you consider the possibility that even _Dean_ doesn’t know what you are, and _you_ don’t know what you are, and what you are doesn’t matter as long as you know Dean better than you know yourself, there’s an echo of fear. But it’s only long-lost echoes.

You wonder how you will feel when you start to feel again. You wonder when it will happen. You think that one of the first things you’ll feel might be _hurt_ , from Dean not being able to tell that you were pretending. From what you remember, your feelings were _hurt_ a lot of the time before this. It seems like such a nuisance.

Dean’s face twitches in his sleep, and then settles back into something peaceful. You think maybe it’s not his fault that he can’t tell the difference. Maybe love makes people prone to seeing what they want to see. It makes them so desperate to believe that they fill in the gaps with whatever they can, just to get the full picture they need. Maybe love makes people stupid.

You wonder if, when you start feeling again, you will want to be stupid.

You get up, and he goes on sleeping. You think that with the help of his stupidity, you’ll be able to make him believe just long enough, until you start feeling again. Even if he starts to suspect something, you’ll probably be back to normal before it has time to develop. To him, it will be as if your feeling never left. He will never have to know. It’s the best thing you can do for him.

You get ready to go for a run.

 

_Solace_

Dean hasn’t been talking to you much at all for the last several hours. When he does, it’s mean. “Should I pick you up some batteries while I’m out, or do you run on solar power?” It’s things that would be jokes if his expression wasn’t shredded up with hurt. He asks, “You seriously don’t feel anything, dude, _anything_?” as if you asked for it to be this way.

You listen with interest. It’s fascinating to recognize the cuts of his voice and the way his eyes are sealed off and bleeding out at the same time. You see that they are things that would be hurting you, right now, if that thing wasn’t missing. If your soul wasn’t missing. The things Dean is saying, they would twist your heart every which way until it screamed.

That’s part of why he’s saying them, too. It’s some masochistic urge to see your lack of reaction so he can be hurt by it.

His emotional masochism would be hurting you right now, too, if your soul wasn’t missing. You remember that kind of pain being nauseating, not sharp at all. It makes you wonder why you would want to feel that again.

“Don’t even know what I’m fucking doing here with this, thing,” Dean grumbles on his motel bed, mostly to himself but without guard, as if you don’t count as an eavesdropper. Instead of hurt, you’re mildly aware of injustice. It’s not as though you’re choosing to do this. You came out of the cage knowing you were changed, but you always thought it must have been the trauma, or exhaustion, or any number of things. There was no way you could have identified that your _soul_ was missing, and it’s not like there are a bunch of ways you could have figured out how to get it back _before_ presenting yourself to Dean. You didn’t do anything wrong.

But still, Dean has been wronged. Since you’re not hurt by the injustice, you decide to let Dean’s hurt take center stage.

Quietly, you push your chair back from the mini table so you can walk over to Dean’s bed and sit down. “Come on, Dean,” you say in your softest voice. He’s hunched over with his feet on the floor as though getting ready to stand, but he’s been in that pose for over five minutes. You ease yourself onto your side so that when you prop your head up on your hand, you’re breathing down onto his hip. “It’s not so bad,” you tell him. You curl your free hand around the hip you’re not facing. His skin goes tense under your touch.

You may not be capable of loving right now, (and maybe soon you’ll be allowed to celebrate that relieving fact, the knowledge that there’s an external _reason_ that you’re like this,) but devotion must be different from love, because you think that Dean should be comforted right now, and you know how to do that. You nudge your fingertips just under the hem of his shirt, and stroke his skin just so. “It’s okay.”

There’s a brief sting of excitement as you think, _maybe you don’t know Dean as well as you thought you did_ , when your touch has the opposite effect you intended and Dean is twisting to get his fist into your face. He looks the opposite of soothed as he hits you, and as he hits you again.

But as the sting of the second blow sinks in and fades in preparation for the third, you realize that this was, in fact, your intended effect. This is what Dean needs, even if neither of you realized it, and this is what you are giving him.

He gets you on your back, straddles you and hits you over and over again, and you soak it up. He hits you so hard his knuckles must ache with it. He hits you as though he’s breaking something down.

He its you as though if he busts you up bad enough, he’ll find his little brother hiding somewhere inside.

There’s a moment when you think you might pass out. Coincidentally, it’s the same moment he decides to lay off your face and bury his fists in your gut instead. You rebound. You tense your abdomen to be as rigid as possible, not for protection, but to give Dean the continued satisfaction of a hard impact.

Before your face swells too much, you glimpse his eyes, part sharp emerald, part stormy sea. He doesn’t spend too long on your stomach. Soon, he’s collapsing forward so his face fills the corner between your neck and your shoulder. His fists are on either side of you, pounding at your ribs listlessly. His body is shaking. His breath hitches wetly, and you know that now he is crying.

“It’s okay, Dean,” you whisper. The words make the cuts on your lips sting. “You’ll get him back.”

He sobs once, collapses further down onto your chest. It’s enough that you can wrap your arms around his back and hold him. You nestle your cheek against the top of his head. “Shhh, we’ll get my soul back, Dean, promise.” You promise this because it’s what he needs to hear, but you can’t imagine the words coming true. You try. But even if there was some insane easy fix, you can’t imagine wanting it back. You can’t imagine wanting to feel the pain Dean is feeling. You can’t imagine having it back.

“We’ll get it back,” you repeat. You run your palms firmly up and down the planes of his back. His shuddering dies down slightly. One of his hands has curled itself around your shoulder, but his remaining fist bites into your ribs a few more times, no longer desperate. You think of that kid in _A Christmas Story_ , beating some other kid to a pulp while tears are streaming down his own face. You think how much you like that movie, and should watch it again. It makes you laugh.

Dean sobs with teeth at your neck. You wish you could long to give him your soul.


End file.
